Fubrellis ghost, p.1
Fubrelli's Ghost, page 1
Fubrelli’s Ghost
Sean Monaghan
Copyright © 2022 Sean Monaghan
All rights reserved.
Published by Triple V Publishing
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Cover illustration
© Sergey Khakimullin| Dreamstime
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Discover other titles by this author at:
www.seanmonaghan.com
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This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional.
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No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, except for fair use by reviewers or with written permission from the publisher. www.triplevpublishing.com
Created with Vellum
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
About the Author
Also by Sean Monaghan
Chapter One
The cap on the soda bottle was aluminum. Shiny, and embossed with the name of the manufacturer. Dr Almo. Claire had brought the bottle along from Earth, despite the regulations.
Sentimental reasons.
She ran her finger over the lid, enjoying the feel of its cold, rippled surface. The bottle was shaped too, cylindrical and tapered. Comfortable in her hand. A half liter.
From behind her came the whump and drone of the busted air systems. She would get to it.
The bottle was glass--hence the restrictions on hauling it into space. Heavy. Prone to breakage.
She'd had the bottle since she'd been a kid. Refillable. Sometimes she filled it with water, occasionally with soda. There was an old recipe her grandfather had given her, when he'd gifted her the bottle, of how to make cherry cola. He could never quite get the almondy taste of the original quite right. That was fine. Cherry cola was good. It reminded her of him.
The recipe was on a worn piece of paper now, written in his crooked script, some of the measurements ambiguous. Claire had it in her head, anyway. No shifting that.
Water, obviously, something to carbonate it with--no trouble on a station where everything was pressurized--and a few key ingredients. Sugar or sweetener. Cherry puree. Ground cola beans. A little caffeine. A touch of vanilla.
Every batch she made was different, but that was kind of the point.
Whenever she drank from the bottle, it reminded her of home. Of her grandfather.
He'd owned just sixteen acres of land in backwater New Zealand. Way, way off the proverbial beaten track. Over the hills from the main highway between Auckland and Wellington, then onto a tertiary road, followed by a one lane bitumen track that had to be a hundred years old, and onto the dirt road that led to his compact spread.
He called it a spread. Most people would have called it a jungle.
Behind her, in the narrow compartment, one of the telltales began bleeping. A soft, electronic sound. Nothing urgent. A tiny amber pinpoint biolume blinked with it. Just an alert that systems were being tested.
The transition access compartment was five meters long, a shade under two meters across and a shade over two meters high. Six biolume downlights lit the volume. The walls creaked a little, which was never reassuring.
The space reeked of plastic and solvent and human sweat.
At each end, sealed steely hatchways kept the integrity in place. Oblongs set just above the floor, a little over meter and a half high, seventy-five centimeters wide. A fifteen centimeter section of wall below. She was the only one on Callisto who didn't have to bend down when she stepped through.
Small was good when spaceflight was concerned, she would remind the others. Roy was tall and would sit in a little capsule with his knees up around his ears.
Fun to be around though. He liked to say he was two thousand and one centimeters tall, which was perfectly appropriate for coming out to the orbit of Jupiter.
No one got it, and it had become a running gag that he had to explain his joke. Some old movie about a journey to discover the mysteries of Jupiter. Came out before anyone had even set foot on the moon. The film was filled with green men and ray guns, presumably. Claire had never seen it.
One side of the narrow compartment had racks of lockers and shelves. Silvery latches holding the white doors closed. All the corners were rounded. There were vents on their faces, like the gills on a shark. If the station decompressed, the vents would prevent more damage, apparently.
If the station decompressed, who cared about a few personal items and sundry and miscellanea stowed in lockers near the airlocks?
Really, they would all be dead anyway.
Facing the lockers was a window that looked out over Callisto’s surface and out into space. Jupiter just above the horizon, a crescent as Callisto sped around to catch the sun.
Out on the surface, the little golden ball of a sample bot crept along, antennas wobbling. The size of a house cat, it was one of hundreds. All bustling around boring and scooping and measuring.
The window was why she was here in the compartment, if she was honest with herself. Checking systems and running analytics were just excuses.
The view of Jupiter was stunning. She was always changing. Different cloud formations that had such depth it was almost as if you could dive right in. And the angle of the sun striking the clouds was extraordinary. The shape changing from full to gibbous to crescent to haloed, and back again.
Fabulous.
Another bleep.
The telltale was blinking above locker thirteen. Something minor was amiss.
Claire tore her gaze away from the planet and turned to face the lockers. The doors were scratched and scraped in places. Once, they would have been polished and perfectly smooth.
Callisto Station had been assembled by robots. Ready for the crew before they'd even left Earth.
Funny how quickly things began to look burnished and chipped and broken.
Claire unscrewed the bottle's cap. The liquid hissed and the sweet cherry smell wafted to her. She sipped. The liquid wrapped itself around her mouth and she swallowed.
The telltale blinked and bleeped again.
"Claire?" a voice said from the speaker. "Where's your suit pack?"
That would be Roy, of course. Always checking up on her.
Claire recapped the bottle.
"Claire? Suit pack? You know you have to wear it anywhere outside of core.
"Guess I left it. You know, back at the repair shop."
She was in the wrong, but after so many months out here, it was getting kind of tiresome.
Most of the station was protected by double layers. With a pile of heaped ice over the top, but also the fact that there were more compartments and corridors and storage spaces between most of the station and the exterior.
While the view here was perfect, it was just a single layer between her and the vacuum of the surface.
Claire turned and touched the glass. Cold.
Technically not a single layer. The wall had exterior and interior faces, with a thick sandwich of insulation and micrometeor absorption gels between. Fifteen centimeters across.
And the window was multiple layers too. Silicon glass, plastic, more glass, more plastic, more glass. Tested under missile fire. Tank-buster rockets hadn't been able to get through it.
But still, she was fifteen centimeters from cold vacuum.
Something glinted out on the surface.
"Claire," Roy said. "You're goofing off. Getting slack. I'm going to have to report this."
"Mm," she said, craning to see what had glinted. The light was wrong.
"Claire. Put on a suit. Now."
The glint came again.
Human shaped. Moving toward her.
Chapter Two
Suit packs were simple emergency things. A sealed, reticulated overall with a small breathing apparatus. They weren't too bulky, weren't too heavy. The gloves with thin mesh and the helmet was really just a half helmet. Wrapped around the back of your head, but didn't come farther forward than your ears.
The whole thing was designed to deploy rapidly in the event of explosive decompression. The helmet's visor would inflate and flip into place. Overgloves would expand o
Claire knew it. She'd done enough shifts on maintenance checks. The stink of the special bioplastics that were used was like a cross between manure and swamp water and baby farts. The compromise of something that worked effectively.
At least they only stank that bad when they were deploying.
"Claire?" Roy said. "You know that I can see you there? Goofing off, staring at the planet."
There were cameras throughout the station of course. Hundreds of them. Not so much for keeping an eye on whoever was goofing off. More for monitoring station integrity.
She was wearing regular station overalls. Comfy and well-fitted. Soft cotton. Easy to get around in. Far easier than the suit pack, even if those were far easier than the full EVA or SW suits. Extra-Vehicular Activity and Surface Work.
Those were diabolical. Jointed and bulky and so claustrophobic. Breathing through the systems made her nervous.
She might have passed the psych evals before leaving, but it was hard to know if she would pass them now.
Four months on the ground at Callisto might be her limit.
Ten months to go.
Then the quickship back to Mars--which wasn't quick at all--before even being able to consider getting home.
"I'm tired, Roy," she said.
"If you're tired then you'll get stood down. You know that. Back into supervised minor duties."
Basically meaning only things that couldn't screw up vital station systems. Collating data and laundry duty and running the station gaming. The sweepstakes and bingo and roulette nights.
Fun, fun.
"I see something out there," she said, looking back out onto the mare. The little golden bot kept shambling along.
"Claire. I need you to come back into the anteroom. C3. Then I want you to use the gear station to put on a suit pack. This is not a request. This is simple safety protocol."
The human shape was moving, but indistinct. As if there was a blur in the glass. A smear of oil on the surface. Or something in her eye.
She blinked and the shape was gone.
Jupiter hung there and the bot's antennas quivered.
"Coming in now," she said. "Sorry."
She turned and headed back the way she'd come.
A tapping sound came from the window.
Claire turned.
She was at a bad angle now, closer to the hatch. Looking at the glass at an angle of maybe twenty degrees. It was thick. Refractive. Mostly black. The shimmer of stars.
But even so it looked like there was someone there. Hand raised.
Tapping at the glass.
Chapter Three
Roy sat at his desk in the main feeds shack. Deep in the heart of the station, it was probably the safest spot in the event of one of those catastrophic failures they'd trained for. Emergency suits in lockers under the floors. A twin set of hatches effectively making an airlock.
The scent of flowers wafted through the room. Roy had one of those select-a-scent devices on the corner of his long curved black desk. The scent smelled too artificial. As if the device was trying too hard.
He had a ceramic cup near the main display. White, with an image of blue Callisto. Tendrils of vapor rose from the top. Rosehip tea or something. Roy liked his electrolytes or antioxidants or whatever.
The room was five or six times the volume of Claire's small personal room, but it still felt cramped on account of the displays and other equipment around. Tool sets and spare wheels for the bots, boxes of papers, a busted water filter that was streaked with black-brown around its seams and really looked like it should be binned.
There were eight staff at the station, including Claire. If they did have to use the room as an emergency bunker, then it would be real cramped.
The displays showed data streams and video. All of it being piped back to Earth, of course. That was where most of the analysis happened.
The scientists on station needed to be here, apparently. AI and technicians could only do so much.
"See here?" Roy said, pointing at one of the displays. It had rounded corners like the hatches, and was almost as big. The biggest in the room. The display stood on a plinth made from cut sections of a meteorite found on Callisto’s surface. Black and pitted and oddly shiny within the pits.
The display showed feeds from both inside the transition access compartment and outside.
Inside, a frozen image of Claire, one hand holding her soda bottle, the other clearly twisting at the cap. She was facing the window.
"I see it," Claire said. That view. Worth the price of admission, that was for sure.
The station had on observation dome, set above the piles of ice, up a three meter long tunnel. Accessed via a set of ladder rungs.
The dome was specifically for that kind of goofing off. Triple sealed. Enough space for three people at a time. Comfy reclining sofas that would adjust at a touch, depending on whether you wanted to look straight out into the cosmos or look at Jupiter, or look down across Callisto’s pitted and broken surface.
A cylinder, with a curved dome on top, like a lid, the walls were almost a meter high, and the windows more than that. It was a wonderful extravagance. A real moment of inspiration on the part of the station's designers.
People who understood that not everything could be reduced to the matters of science.
Claire had spent her fair share of evenings up there. Shift done. Sipping at wine with Devon or Miguel. Sometimes that what just what was needed.
"And tell me what you see." Roy pointed again at the display.
"That's me. Looks like I'm out of uniform. Bit of a screw up, really."
"You," he said, "are the screw-up. You talk back. You make up your own rules. I've read your file three times and--"
"You read my file?"
"--I can't fathom how you got through."
"Because I'm good. You know that."
Roy sighed. He leaned back. He was sitting in an upright chair with AI legs. It adjusted to his movement.
Claire was standing. There were a couple of standard, wheeled chairs nearby. So many times she'd seen Roy in here with others, leaning in at the displays, poring over the data.
"I know you're good," he said.
"You're not even in charge of me. Why are you busting my chops over something like this? I went to check the anomaly report on that locker. It's a five minute job. Getting into a suit pack is a five minute job in and--"
"No."
"--of itself."
"You've got it all wrong. That five minute job that takes ten minutes because you've got to put on a suit pack is what saves hours in the end."
Clair blinked at him. She unscrewed the cap from her soda and brought it to her lips. Sipped. Good. Refreshing.
"Yeah," she said. "You lost me there."
"It saves me hours," Roy said.
"Okay. Still not following." She took another sip.
Another sigh from Roy.
"Because, if there's an accident and you die, I get the paperwork. Not to mention whoever gets on clean-up crew and has to scrub your fluids from the walls and scoop up your organs from the floor. I don't care if you die, but I really don't like the idea of what a time-waster you become."
Claire ran her tongue around her left cheek and over her top teeth, pushing out her lip.
"What about outside," she said. "What did you see outside?"
"Outside?"
"What I saw. Outside. Someone outside the station."
Roy scowled. "You saw a glint of light."
